Touch: A Sherlock Holmes 2009 flash fiction
by L A Adolf
Summary: Emerged from his journey down the rabbit hole, Holmes finds it difficult to trust the input of his senses. flash fiction inspired by the talented Delorita's wall paper "Walking Around You" on LJ.


Touch

L.A. Adolf

My eyes open to a vision that I am sure must be part of the fever dreams I've just left.

Watson sits across the room from me, writing nonchalantly in his ever-present notebook. He is alive, whole, seemingly hale.

But I'd seen him… caught in the explosion, engulfed by flames. Lost horribly to them…

…lying insensible in the surgery ward of the Veteran's hospital, horrible shrapnel wounds to his neck and shoulder, untouched and untended, except for my inexpert ministrations.

He cannot really be here. True, he looks a bit worse for wear, and sports a sling about his left arm, but he is as dapper as ever. He cannot have been that close to death and here now. It is not in the realm of the reasonable.

_Once you have eliminated the impossible…_

Irene is speaking. I am confused. Why is she here? She'd rabbited away from the slaughterhouse, I assumed to finally follow my advice to leave London. I turn my head in her direction; try to focus on what she's saying.

All the time my true attention is on the figure of Watson. My hearing straining to be reassured by the sound of him breathing, of his heart beating. But though both my aural and ocular senses have been honed by practice and force of will, I cannot, in the core of my being, trust either one.

I struggle to sit up. So Coward has issued a warrant for my arrest. That clicks the final piece into place.

My palms are sweaty. I don't understand why. A lingering aftereffect of my evening's exercise of the practical arts? Or something else?

"You look _gorgeous_." The vision of Watson says, aloud.

I know then that he must be a lingering revenant of my bolt down the rabbit-hole. My Watson, my soon to be _married _Watson, could never say such an improper thing. At least not in tones not dripping with his patented brand of sarcasm. This pronouncement carries nothing but affection, concern and relief.

It does not logically follow. While such is not beyond my friend, it has been so long since I've heard those qualities in his voice when directed at me, that I cannot fathom them being real now. Not after what I've caused to happen to him.

But if he is a phantasm, I am not yet ready to leave my delusions behind, no matter how right Adler is about it being time to get to work. My gaze goes back to him, drinks him in.

He rises, closing the distance between us, sits down beside me on the cot, the length of his thigh warm against the chill of my own. I relax into that touch even though I know it can't truly be real.

"I'm so relieved that you are…still…with us." I say feebly, my hands clutching spasmodically at the cloth I'd been wiping them with; it is damp with the sweat and tinged with the blood of my cut thumb. Perhaps Irene had used it to staunch whatever bleeding had remained after I had fallen into delirium—or had my dream of having Watson's blood still on my hands, been true all along, the literal having translated itself into the figurative?

Watson and I do not look at each other for a long awkward moment. He clears his throat, the leg next to mine moves ever so slightly, shifting away and then close again.

The evidence of my physical being wars with what my rational mind tells me. Watson is sitting beside me. Warm and alive, if somewhat discomfited and at a loss for words. He is real, he breathes, his heart beats. He holds himself stiffly against unvoiced pain.

The sensory input is too much…I close my eyes and when I open them…

_Whatever remains,_

Time seems to flash forward. I am pacing, lath in hand. I am marshalling my thoughts, pulling together from the non linear images that have flooded my brain and been my reality for these many hours, reasoned discourse. Watson is again across the room from me.

"And though I dirtied my fluffy white tail, I have emerged, enlightened…"

The march of the words, the thread of logic and reason comfort my still unsettled soul. The world orders itself around me, resolving itself into terms I can deal with once again.

My overloaded senses sort themselves out as well. I can hear the clatter of the streets surrounding the Punchbowl, feel the slight chill to the November air coming in through cracked windows, smell the fragrance of Irene's Parisian perfume delicate in the air.

Taste the ashes of yesterday's horror on my tongue.

_However improbable…_

I move toward Watson, who listens, quietly and patiently, accustomed, as ever, to my dramatic bent, seemingly content to give me free rein.

I don't plan, as I draw close, to touch him. Especially not on his injured shoulder, but my hand has a will and purpose of its own and it seeks the solace of contact. I retain enough control to make that touch the lightest and most tender that I can, willing the sensitive nerves of my fingertips to gather the data my rational mind is now demanding.

…_must be the truth._

I cannot continue if he is endangering himself, if there is the barest chance of infection I will see him bundled back to the hospital, tied down if that is what it takes to keep him there.

The flesh beneath the clothing is unremarkable in temperature and I am relieved. I allow my hand to rest there, on his poor abused shoulder, for a moment longer, then reassure myself of the veracity of my assessment by trailing that same hand across the broad expanse of his shoulder blade and back. Continuing my discourse, I pause in my perambulation, leaning just a bit into his good right shoulder. I use that contact to communicate what is in my heart, but which I cannot say.

_Forgive my old friend; no matter if you think the game worth the wounds, I do not. I have been given a reprieve, which I shall not waste._


End file.
